Hanseldee and Greteldum

-33- The “literary canon”, by the way, is a master list of works that everyone pretends doesn’t exist (the list, not the works) but that we all know matters in some important way.

-34- Fairy tales are useful because they’re the only sure fire stories that everyone knows. You can’t count on your audience knowing Shakespeare, Homer or Joyce.

-35- We’re not trying to recreate the fairy tale here. Rather, we’re trying to make us of details and patterns, portions of some prior story (or, once you start really thinking like a professor, “prior text”, since everything is a text) to add depth and texture to your story, to bring out a theme, to lend irony to a statement, to play with readers’ deeply ingrained knowledge of fairy tales. So use as much or as little as you want.

It’s Greek to Me

-36- Myths are the shaping and sustaining power of story and symbol. It’s a body of story that matters, of the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways physics, philosophy, mathematics and chemistry can’t.

-37- That explanation takes the shape of stories that are deeply ingrained in our group memory, that shape our culture and are in turn shaped by it, that constitute a way of seeing by which we read the world and, ultimately, ourselves.

-38- In this activity of reading and understanding literature, we’re chiefly concerned with how that story functions as material for literary creators, the way in which it can inform a story or poem, and how it is perceived by the reader.

-39- Homer gives us four great struggles of the human being: with nature, with the divine, with other humans, and with ourselves. What is there, after all, against which we need to prove ourselves but those four things?